I don't think the magazine's writers were trying to be funny. It sounds as if there was no one they really wanted to name Person of the Year; they spent two or three marathon meetings fueled by coffee, cigarettes, pizza and doughnuts wrestling with that problem, and this is what came out.

But I do wonder if Time thinks Hu Jintao is a question.

Dan wrote: "Beyond the instinct to giggle and the God-awful bubble-headed prose, however, there is the core of an idea worth expanding into a popular book -- the idea of production by consumption.

For a wide variety of products, traditional consumers now add value by mixing, matching, riffing, sampling, commenting, critiquing, customizing, and mutating goods and services."

The seminal book on this subject is by Michael de Certeau--The Practice of Everyday Life--described in Certeau's wikipedia entry as "a theory of the productive consumptive activity inherent in everyday life." It was published in France in 1974, translated to English in 1984.

Despite all Dan's hyperbole about consumption equaling production due to the "mixing, matching, riffing, sampling, commenting, critiquing, customizing, and mutating" any SUCCESSFUL manufacturer could explain the glaring hole in that theory--value is defined by the customer, not the marketers, theorists, or bloggers. Consumptive production is, despite it's thirty-plus year life, really only a paper construct for those who think "Web 2.0" really exists as a tangible entity and that there is such a thing as a "new economy" wherein one can sustain an economic profit model without supplying any goods or services.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/17/144245/36

Hilarious.